Blood Earth and South Africa’s White Farmers

On March 8, the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU) requested economic sanctions against the President and Parliament of South Africa until they provide white farmers with adequate protection. TAU believes 99.9 % of farm murders are of whites, and is requesting an EU resolution on their behalf.1

From 2001 to 2010, 129 South Africans were granted asylum in the U.S.. Refugee claimants are reported to have difficulty finding support from U.S. academics who assess South Africa as a post-apartheid society. Suggested sites for immigration are currently the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany and Ireland.2 A website of the Dutch based Afrikaner Rescue Action Fund, concerned with Afrikaner refugees suggests a psychology of long term exclusion, and close to a million Afrikaners in poverty and squatter camps. It claims white Africans aren’t being integrated into the economy, but shows no concern for the poverty of other South Africans. In November 2011 an Afrikaner website, “Long walk since freedom,” was barred by the South African government from carrying current news items.

The U.S. has opened a military command for interventions in Africa, and a correlated agit-propaganda campaign is expectable. With reference to the murder of nearly four thousand ethnically European farmers, the term “White Genocide,” is currently being applied to the situation of white farmers by the U.S. based Project South Africa. Its website features an ugly racist quote by Albert Schweitzer (b. 1875) to present an agenda of small U.S. demos protesting treatment of the white farmers while ignoring Afrikaner poor and the greater numbers in poverty of their non-white countrymen. The focus on crimes against white South Africans as a separate group re-kindles grievances ‘resolved’ by South Africa’s independence. The term “white genocide” taps into racist, extremist and neo Nazi support,3 noted by a Feb. 27th demonstration in Sacramento California where Project demonstrators and police were met by “Occupy Oakland” and accused of Klan influence. 4

However there is evidence that members of white farming families in both Zimbabwe and South Africa are abused, murdered, threatened, forced to flee, or still struggling to continue their care for the land of their fathers. “Farm crime” is increasing, and numbers of the remaining, decreasing. The farmers, landowners, are taking grace, relying on international supporters which include elements of the extreme right, and relying on the wisdom of African national leadership and the humanity of other South Africans who aren’t white. The relative non-violence of South Africa’s independence, after the years of brutal oppression, speaks for its peoples’ restraint and humanity.

Afrikaners carried both the disenfranchisement of defeat and the onus of their regime’s injustices as the Western world embraced Mandela and Independence was sewed up by the corporations and international bankers: many of South Africa’s people have remained in poverty. Expendable to the centres of power Afrikaners as a group, were unwanted, vulnerable, and marginalised as extremists due to their group’s crimes of oppression. The hope for its young may be to reinvigorate the struggle for the rights of all South Africans. If apartheid were gone from South Africa, Afrikaners would be providing a buffer against non-African interests.

Instead white farm families in Zimbabwe and South Africa become representatives of the old European colonialism and currently serve as scapegoats for all sides. The people, black, brown and white, remain in poverty.

NATO country intelligence agencies are historically oriented to protecting white populations. Their policies which result in the destruction of racial, religious, ethnic groups (ie. genocide) inevitably invite retribution. A recurring pattern of destructions suggests the intention of genocide. U.S. / NATO agendas increasingly stumble over the massive death rate of Black Africans in Libya, Cote d’Ivoire, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo. Current U.S. / NAT0 policies risk to retribution all white African groups and all minorities with European affinity.

Since farm families know the land they cultivate, it would make sense to consider them deeply connected to the land, grant them State protection, and treat them as national assets while assuring profits from the land’s production to the nation’s people. In other words, the farms should be nationalized and placed in farm family trusts immune from political control but at the service of the nation. Because the farms are not in the service of the people, their owners become symbols of the old oppression. The large number of Afrikaner poor sharing the poverty of their countrymen, have already paid the bill for equality. Where excluded from the national life because of their race, mechanisms of redress might be requested at international court, but since the poverty is inherently South African both groups might do better to cohere to struggle for their improved chances at survival.

Amid a politics formed by foreign interests, the great majority of Africans haven’t been paid for the sale and use of their national resources: there’s a lack of balance between the coining of resource wealth and the wealth of the land’s people. U.S. / NATO African policy assures there will be no balance.

Destabilization leads to war, displacement, famine. Its tactic is to generate inter-religious, inter-racial, and inter-tribal hatred. As an example the Rwandan genocide occurred within the context of an historical tension between Tutsi (the minority control for the former colonial power) and the Hutu majority. The Tutsi invasion established the English language in a Francophone country and exchanged its currency for the American dollar; it’s unrealistic to consider this genocide within an entirely African context. It was certainly not to the interests of native Rwandans to slaughter each other. It wasn’t to the interests of Ivorians to have the validity of their democratic elections decided by European armed force. It is not to the interests of the Congolese people to fight each other when the profits from stripping natural resources aren’t shared by the people.

Christian communities, white farming communities, and Afrikaners have in common an affinity with European traditions, but their communities may be intentionally sacrificed to the West’s efforts at re-colonization. These minorities may encourage a wedge for European incursion. They are also likely targets in destabilization efforts, scapegoats for Euro-American corporate policies, and at risk in providing a pretext for military intervention by the West on ‘humanitarian grounds’. For this reason a genocide warning is placed for Afrikaners in South Africa (nightslantern.ca/02.htm#sa).

The white farmers (ie. landholders) have alternatives: 1. to adapt; 2. to leave; 3. to place their farms at the service of the people.

The Afrikaners in poverty have these: 1. to collect evidence of their exclusion and take the Government to court for breaking its commitment to the U.N. “International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights;” 2. to join with the non-white South African poor in the struggle for change. An alternative for both is to agitate for Euro-American military intervention, a betrayal of South Africa, risking a more dangerous persecution unprotected by the Convention on Genocide.

3. Use of the term “White Genocide” by right-wing groups seeking to advance through appeals to white fear, lower birthrates particularly in Europe, racism, and international attempts at democratization, ignores the history that brought about current persecution. It’s a problematic issue, unresolved, dating back to African independence, where colonial oppressors were identified by their skin color and culture. European targets of Black independence movements were not protected by the Convention on Genocide in Algeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Congo, or South Africa. Why ? Because the people they oppressed, the Black Africans, weren’t. Revolutions and wars of resistance are the result of injustice recognized as provocation. So a specific target of the Leopard Society throughout Europe’s colonies, was whites. The working class of the European colonialist apparatus was often sacrificed by its managers and their countries’ corporations. After the French defeat in Algeria, NATO countries were assured a percentage of resource profits from independence governments before the transition was effected. In resistant cases such as the former Belgian Congo, Patrice Lumumba was simply murdered to allow continued resource-stripping.4. “Occupy group confronts pro-white rally at Capitol,” AP, Feb. 27, 2012, SFGate.

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